Targets 4K Editing, Grading and Compositing Workflows

AMD has launched a 4K-ready professional graphics card, the AMD FirePro W8100, that it says is nearly 38 times the performance of its closest competing card. Based on the second generation of the company's AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, the new card is directly aimed at 4K film and television workflows, 4K design visualization and CAD and the emerging field of desktop "personal" supercomputing.

Powered by OpenCL and designed to load large datasets, the card's 8 GB of GDDR5 memory, up to 4.2 TFLOPS of single-precision compute performance and 2.1 TFLOPS of double-precision compute performance earmark it for demanding 4K-display-driven post workflows, particularly those in editing, color correction and compositing. The FirePro W8100 GPU can easily handle 4K footage on its internal memory, giving workstations crunching huge files a big boost in flexibility, responsiveness and productivity. AMD workstation partner HP and software partner Assimilate have endorsed the card's potential productivity gains when used with their products. Up to four cards combined in a single workstation, says AMD, could push that system's GPU performance to more than 16 TFLOPS.

The new card will be available in July from AMD's global distribution partners and major workstation providers like HP and Dell.